ott white paper

OTT has come down from the clouds.

It’s ready for prime time, within an overall

video delivery strategy.

A White Paper by Benjamin Schwarz - June 2012

OTT video delivery

A Harmonic, Viaccess-Orca and Broadpeak OTT White Paper, by Benjamin Schwarz – May 2012

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Executive summary and paper contents

Underlying technologies to cost-effectively deliver video content over the Internet

have matured enough for carrier grade deployments.

Competitive pressure and customer expectations have taken away time to learn

as you go.

The large one-stop-shop suppliers don’t yet have reliable end-to-end solutions

and it’s a jungle out there. So how can you choose the right way forward?

This White Paper discusses the principle technical, business and user experience

challenges and promises for service providers.

After clarifying what OTT is all about, we argue that new open standards like

MPEG-DASH and pre-integrated building blocks already enable operators to

deploy OTT services based on best-of-breed components within a short time-to-

market.

Introduction

A graphical definition of the two sides of the OTT sword for IP operators

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After two decades of skirmishes, OTT could represent the final convergence

between broadcasting and telecommunications. Whether as allies or as

competitors both worlds are rushing into OTT. Key technologies under the OTT

banner are adaptive bit rate (ABR) streaming and Content Delivery Networks

(CDN), but flexible content security and a seamless User Experience (UX) also

provide challenges. Those are the four elements of an integrated solution that this

paper introduces.OTT is not a one size fits all technology and it is still not capable

of delivering reliable HD quality to all devices over any network at any time.

Why this White Paper is different: customer managed relations, not

CRM

Pay TV operators and Telcos alike feel they own the customer relationship and

have learnt to profit from it accordingly. This is changing as consumers take back

much of the ownership of that relationship.

Competition for early Internet based services was just a mouse-click away. The

same phenomenon is now reaching the Pay TV landscape as the “walled

gardens” open up, though premium live sports remain a bastion that incumbent

TV players are still keeping beyond newcomer’s reach.

US pay TV operators like DirecTV or Verizon offer premium live sports on all screens

using OTT technologies, to keep their subscribers from churning. The have no

choice as the National Football League (NFL) and National Hockey League (NHL)

can already be accessed with an OTT package on most devices.

For the consumer, such OTT access to premium content will also be an important

aspect of empowerment. This has security consequences for the operator and

affects their relationship with customers.

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All-powerful Customer Relation Management (CRM) must be changed into CMR,

or Customer Managed Relations, as the consumer is empowered, creating a new

balance between users’ freedom and content owners’ need for reassurance.

A Unified Service Delivery Platform (USDP) with components that work together

seamlessly is needed to monetize the new OTT opportunities. Such a platform

must interoperate with all the main devices and rights management systems out

there. We make the case for the pre-integrated approach as best placed to

bring the right technologies, while guaranteeing that they will work together with

the minimum of effort, and with a short deployment time.

But could OTT just be this year’s fad?

OTT holds incredible promise for new business models. The seemingly unstoppable

rise of Netflix is causing concern for many throughout the industry. Of course the

perceived risk of Netflix eating your lunch is just the other side of the opportunity

coin. So whether you’re a broadcaster, a content operator, or a network

operator, OTT delivery is an urgent topic to tackle.

Disruptive OTT business models could still take years to prosper. The business model

often just doesn’t fly yet, as early pioneers like Joost found out. Many current

deployments by TV operators are still defensive, churn reducing, rather than

revenue driving.

But the OTT investments of 2012 will be recouped because OTT is also about

extending existing offers by reaching multiple devices seamlessly. Through ABR

streaming, OTT technology is the best way to get as much capacity as possible

out of the existing network infrastructure.

IPTV emerged for Telcos to get into the TV business using as much of their existing

infrastructures as possible for access, based first on DSL, now increasingly fibre.

While OTT is also great for Telcos, it is not simply IPTV mark 2. It is essential for all

operators to reach multiple screens and in some cases extend their footprint, no

matter how business models might evolve.

As FTTH gradually removes the last-mile problems associated with the copper

legacy, the home network is emerging as a new frontier. Distributing video

content around the home has been a nightmare for operators and subscribers

alike. The ABR streaming at the heart of OTT delivery is well suited for coping with

varying in-house networks where interoperability, automatic device discovery

and secure content delivery will eventually be provided within a framework such

as DLNA.

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In many parts of the world, IPTV services have not been possible so far because

the infrastructure is not good enough.

Laurent Chivallier is Director of Group Digital L!FE – Business Development for

NextGen TV/OTT Video in Emerging Markets at Singapore Telecommunications

Limited (SingTel) with a total of 445 million customers in South-East Asia. He told me

“unlike in developed markets, infrastructure is rarely adapted for IPTV in emerging

countries.

In a country like the Philippines, probably less than 12% of the 20 million

households could be reached with a high quality IPTV solution.

So we really need to use a combination of hybrid and mobile OTT approaches

alongside IPTV to reach enough potential subscribers.”

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How OTT delivery works

From a business perspective OTT simply means that the service operator need not

be concerned with the cost of building and maintaining the network used to

deliver the service. The network will often be the open Internet. But there is a cost

involved in offering the best possible UX relating to the two key technical building

blocks that are required for OTT delivery: ABR and CDNs.

ABR streaming is the OTT mechanism for delivering video to consumer devices

over non-dedicated networks like the Internet. ABR streaming ensures that the

show will go on so long as minimal resources are available, and at the same time

delivers video at the best quality possible at a given time. ABR streaming is

discussed in detail in several excellent white papers, including those mentioned in

the references at the end of this document.

Legacy IPTV architecture

“Legacy IPTV” was still an oxymoron two years ago. But to better understand the

transition to OTT video delivery architectures, let’s start with a plain vanilla IPTV

setup.

Overlaying OTT delivery on top of IPTV

OTT is being deployed into managed networks. The diagram below illustrates this

with the pre-integrated components discussed throughout this paper. But many

operators are using the opportunity of OTT deployment to optimize the use of their

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IPTV infrastructure. One idea is to use only the best of both worlds. IPTV is then

dedicated to mainstream live TV, while OTT infrastructure is dedicated to on-

demand content and less popular live channels. Multicast is only used by IPTV,

and IPTV only uses multicast. The same becomes true of unicast and OTT. The IPTV

infrastructure in the diagram below includes a Broadpeak Quality of Experience

Server to enable Fast Channel Change (FCC) and RTP Retry mechanisms to

ensure happy live IPTV customers.

The importance of MPEG-DASH

The major industry players have so far backed different DRMs and so MPEG-DASH

is DRM agnostic.

Microsoft and Adobe are supporting DASH, while Google has not made any

formal announcements yet, although it has announced that the Chrome browser

will support it in HTML5, and its content security company Widevine will support

CENC, the Common Encryption standard used by MPEG-DASH.

If Apple sticks with its HLS, then at least we’ll only have 2 formats that are quite

similar anyway. The main difference is that Apple uses a proprietary format in the

manifest files (see ABR white paper in references), whereas MPEG-DASH is based

on XML. A key problem of HLS is that it is restricted to one DRM and so is not likely

to gain wider adoption in the OTT world beyond Apple iOS – admittedly a large

camp.

We see several key benefits in using MPEG-DASH. The following table summarises

the main differences between the various ABR solutions:

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Table 1 Key differences between the main ABR technologies

Feature Apple Microsoft Adobe MPEG–DASH

Adaptive streaming technology

HLS Smooth Streaming

HDS MPEG–DASH

Codec used H.264 H.264/VC-1 H.264, VP6 H.264/AVC or other MPEG codec family (SVC, MVC, HEVC)

Open standard No No No Yes

Adopted by industry consortium

No No No

HbbTV, YouView published DASH based standards, 3GPP , DECE and DLNA work on a DASH based standard

Subtitle support Partial Yes Partial Yes

Multiple audio support

V4 only * Yes No Yes

Interop testing No No No Yes

Trick mode support

Partial Yes Partial Yes

CDN friendly

Requires chunk carriage optimization

Requires specific IIS-7 server

Requires specific FMS server

Yes

Device support IOS, Mac, Xbox, PlayStation, STB, TV Android.

PC, Xbox, STB, TV

PC, TV Limited in 2012. TV, Tablet, phone in 2013.

Device adoption High Medium Low Netflix**

Common encryption (Multi DRM support)

No No No Yes

Licensing Unknown Unknown Unknown ISO policy ***

(*) only works on iOS 5.1, other versions require separate stream with single audio

(**) Pre-DASH On demand Profile (ISOBMFF)

(***) Discussions going on for a royally free DASH

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CDN: to build or to lease?

The CDN business is a natural fit for existing network operators, and most are

embracing the CDN world wholeheartedly to stay higher up in the content value

chain than being providers of dumb pipes. The question that all operators are

asking is whether to build or lease.

To build means to acquire delivery servers and a management system, and then

to deploy these in the operator’s own network. To lease a CDN means to have a

global CDN provider add its equipment into the operator’s network with a rental

agreement.

The lease option may look attractive for the following reasons:

existing CDN infrastructure speeds deployment

adding a few servers into the operator’s network and linking them to an

existing global infrastructure is simple

Operator benefits from all the features that have already been deployed

and the larger footprint than the operator’s own network

There are however some drawbacks:

less control of infrastructure (e.g. streaming formats available for the ingest

procedure) and of the footprint outside the operator’s own network where

SLAs can be harder to enforce and some promises may not be kept

slower adoption of new technologies with a larger number of servers to be

updated

less leverage of existing IPTV infrastructure that might already be deployed

less flexibility on pricing

more difficulty in maintaining a win-win relationship as the operator can

compete with its provider

a generic solution will not take into account an operator’s unique

requirements, such as:

management of rights that imply that some content is only delivered

to some regions

scheduling of replacement content for live programs

specific types of quotas (bandwidth, sessions, volume, …)

In conclusion, we believe that the CDN lease can be a way of testing the market,

or a solution for very small operators, but only a CDN build will provide a

sustainable solution for most operators to remain attractive to content providers.

Paul Berriman, CTO of the Hong Kong incumbent PCCW, points out one key

reason why CDNs are so important:

“The core network can’t currently support millions of unicast streams in SD let

alone HD. By the time it might be able to, in a few years, users will be expecting

HD if it isn’t some form of 4K or ultra-HD format by then”.

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Some key challenges in converging IPTV & OTT

delivery

OTT may seem poised to take over the video delivery world by storm, but existing

IPTV infrastructure will remain for at least the following reasons:

Operators keep existing infrastructure until investments have been

recouped. For VDSL, the uptake of ABR for live TV will be slower. Indeed

unlike with ADSL, cabinets in VDSL networks are less accessible and often

serve too few homes to justify a cache

Operators for which live TV is still central, that have an existing multicast-

enabled network, will be hard pressed to justify the cost of deploying a

CDN capable of scaling with live TV

IPTV is still the best way to guarantee service availability and content

security over IP

Operators can add on multiscreen to an existing IPTV rollout, also

extending their footprint without needing to revamp the whole

infrastructure

If we extend the comparison to other broadcast technologies beyond IP the case

gets stronger. It is not an either-or question, but one of complementarity. How

best can an operator get OTT delivery to complement its existing infrastructure,

be it broadcast or IPTV based?

The most powerful argument in favour of OTT delivery is the incredible reach it

can offer. The economics of homes passed vs. service uptake are blown away.

Fixed network operators will often look for an early service uptake of at least 10%

to justify an FTTH rollout.

In studying a recent business case for an OTT offering targeted at the global

Indian diaspora of 40M people I realized that if 50k subs was the break-even, an

uptake of 0.125% is all that is required to justify the launch!

The TV User Experience (UX) remains central

Watching TV is something people do for pleasure, and it must be both fun and

easy or it just won’t happen. The lean-forward TV experience with companion

screens and social media is clearly becoming part of the TV experience. But the

lean-back or couch potato model must still be supported.

Second screen capabilities that enhance the UX are pay TV operators’ response

to the emerging threat posed by Apple and Google, which aim to squeeze value

from networks. Telcos are also attempting to retain network value by building

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media awareness into their infrastructures. Even with end-devices playing bigger

roles in managing the quality of experience, the support of the network will be

required for optimal performance. Google and Apple will not be able to remove

the value of the network entirely, even if they can squeeze some of their direct

competitors such as Blackberry out of the picture.

Zeebox co-founder and OTT visionary Anthony Rose previously designed the

biggest OTT success story so far: BBC’s iPlayer. He told me Zeebox delivers a pure

second-screen experience, extending viewing by re-creating a virtual community

around live TV. The app helps find what to watch by seeing what your friends are

watching and letting you interact with them about content. Rose told me,

“Zeebox is using OTT delivery to breathe new life into linear TV”. But this is a

crowded space with examples such as Miso that is doing something similar in the

US with both DirecTV and AT&T.

There is an opportunity for existing operators to score heavily in OTT by delivering

a consistent and intuitive UX across many devices in the window of opportunity

over the next year or two. Some operators are already working towards this by

developing downloadable apps that can set up their UX on the desired target

devices, one example being the French mobile phone and Internet services

provider Bouygues Telecom. Their VP for content and services Frank Abihssira told

me “If Apple’s rumoured 46 inch TV comes in 2012 or 2013, that will only concern

a minority of households that can afford Apple’s world, while Google isn’t really

ready yet on the TV. So a gap will remain in the market for operators like us to

deliver a coherent and consistent UX. It is not a question of whether a Bouygues

app will arrive on connected TVs, it’s just a question of when.”

Abihssira also made the point that such an app would by default be available on

devices even across competitors’ networks. This highlights the changing

competitive framework of OTT, where Telcos will be competing for customers

across each other’s networks.

OTT delivery can improve UX while lowering costs

The inherently multi-bit rate nature of ABR means that devices can request a new

channel at a low bandwidth first, then move up to the optimal stream before the

user has noticed. This means zapping is inherently optimized with ABR.

A sub-optimal VoD deployment on a legacy STB can deliver a poor UX, while on

an iPad, the operator’s app enables a whole new user experience using the

same content.

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Apart from cost, OTT also promises to improve the user’s experience simply by

providing access to a wider range of content. Beyond making premium content

available wherever the user wants to watch it, this means making it easier for

consumers to find niche material that can only be cost-effectively delivered

through OTT mechanisms. Delivering the famous “long tail” of content from within

mainstream TV packages means you will soon be able find and watch that rare

video that only you and a dozen other people on the planet are interested in,

directly on your living room TV.

Comcast, the world’s largest pay TV operator, is delivering some of its VoD

content to game consoles purely to compete with Netflix, and other US MSOs will

follow suit. Major content producers and rights holders themselves illustrate the

urgency of moving forward on this with Epix, a joint venture between three

Hollywood studios. Epix delivers VoD titles to Samsung connected TVs, iOS,

Android devices and via the Roku box, as well as to the MSOs.

In Europe, Canal+ is promoting OTT SVoD to its Pay TV subscribers as well as non-

subscribers. This illustrates how the French operator has moved beyond using VoD

and OTT just as an upsell tool to get subscribers to the “real pay TV product,” but

now sees OTT as a central part of its future.

Where OTT delivery is still challenging for the UX

OTT introduces a delay in transmission of high quality real-time video. The impact

here is for live sports. Hearing the neighbours shout “goal” up to half a minute

before the OTT subscriber sees the goal is clearly an issue.

If part of the network path used is totally uncontrolled (i.e. the open Internet

without any SLAs), then we are back to the Internet’s “best effort” model where it

is impossible to guarantee service continuity. It is unclear how users will react to

such limitations in case of severe outages. The rise of IP telephony a decade ago,

when it was even more unreliable than it is today, proves that users can accept

lower quality if the context and pricing are right. Customers accept degradation

in quality if the content is unique, such as special interest content (ethnic, special

sports) or from YouTube.

Without quality assurance, OTT could end up increasing rather than reducing

churn. Stuart Newton of Ineoquest, a vendor in quality monitoring, told me how

his operator clients handle the UX challenge with OTT. “We’ve been working in

environments where 6 bit rate files per channel have to be delivered in 5 different

formats (HLS, Smooth, HDS, etc.), producing 30 variations per channel. With a 150-

channel line-up up to 4500 variants have to be monitored. This is further

compounded by thousands of different devices accessing those variants.”

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Stuart went on to discuss troubleshooting, “Root cause analysis is exponentially

more difficult to do in an OTT environment where after encoding in the head-end,

the origin servers and cache architecture varies from vendor to vendor. As a

result, a pre-tested, pre-integrated solution clearly makes sense, but when the

architecture is open, we can still integrate easily to provide deep analysis of the

video deployment.” This also highlights how one single file format like MPEG-DASH

will ease the monitoring issue.

It is a mistake to assume that adaptive streaming will deliver at the highest quality

the network is capable of all the time, simply using TCP’s built-in error correction

and packet retransmission to overcome transient problems. “Retransmission won’t

help if packets arrive too late or the content contains errors,” noted Johan Görsjö

from Agama Technologies, another quality monitoring vendor.

So for the best possible UX, operators must strive to deliver the best possible QoE.

This in turn requires monitoring to be integrated into the ecosystem, from

encoding through CDN to secure playback.

Personalization, recommendation, social TV and OTT delivery

OTT is going to be the main way to set up new content delivery for 2012 and

probably beyond.

Today’s mainstream UIs were conceived before it was recognized that social

media would reach the TV. Already, subscribers already expect not just the

integration of social media, but a personalized experience as well. A content

navigation and recommendation platform must be part of any competitive

solution.

Proven web technologies that support personalized services are used within OTT

TV solutions. Content recommendation providers already exploit technologies.

Viaccess-Orca’s COMPASS content discovery solution is an example that delivers

personalization, combining knowledge of the user with non personal information

including the type of content, and other factors such as location.

Content discovery represents a key monetization opportunity for OTT by exploiting

one-to-one relationships with customers. Content discovery is also a good

differentiator of individual services and platforms within the OTT arena. A range of

algorithms can enable users to search and explore effectively within the great

ocean of content accessible via OTT services. No single algorithm satisfies all

content discovery requirements. A blend of techniques enables service providers

to discover the best targeting strategies, rather than taking a one size fits all

approach previously used for linear TV. Social network interaction comes in here,

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enabling service providers in effect to recruit their customers as marketing agents,

promoting their content by recommending it to friends. Social networks also help

in content discovery, providing alternative ways for users to find what to watch.

Personalization enables users to be differentiated within a household, so that

each one can be addressed individually. The same content recommendation

principles can be applied to targeted advertising, which will be a source of

revenue from OTT services.

Challenges and UX impact of doing things at the network’s edge

Assuming the CDN challenge is met properly, popular content makes its way only

once to the edge and is then served to many devices, mimicking a “network

broadcast” or multicast behaviour.

Edge delivery solutions, like those provided by Broadpeak for example, enable

the most popular content to be closest to the end-users. This way live content can

be fetched faster with minimal delays.

Edge processing on the other hand introduces a perceived delay to the end user.

It involves delivering a common high bitrate or Mezzanine format to all edge

processing points, then encapsulating and encrypting the content at the network

edge. It can be difficult to deploy, as it requires content to travel un-encrypted in

the network, which will make most content owners baulk. But this effort is required

because edge processing will be the most efficient way of delivering large

amounts of content to many devices. “Delivering the right content in the right

format at the right time is strategic for operators. Edge caching and processing

represent a clear way forward,” said SingTel’s Chivallier. Again DASH makes the

situation simpler as all content can be encrypted just once at the source,

minimising processing overhead.

A local operator closer to the subscribers will often be better placed to provide a

high quality of service. This argument has been made emphatically by a number

of providers of IPTV and more recently OTT services around the world, such as

Hong Kong based operator PCCW. “As an example of how local operators can

do a better job, local cloud storage that we provide in Hong Kong has 40 to 50

times faster download speeds than a global Dropbox, due to the Cloud Storage

platform being directly connected to the PCCW internet core and customers, not

somewhere out there on the public Internet” said PCCW’s CTO Paul Berriman.

“The same goes for OTT content going through a local operator.” In other words

OTT will continue to require local distribution and edge processing in the long

term, with core network capacity unlikely to increase faster than the traffic levels

it has to support.

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With OTT or IPTV the idea is that the most popular content is cached further down

the network so that it has a shorter journey to make to the many users that want

to view it at different times. This shortens the final unicast path, trading bandwidth

for storage cost, while reducing latency.

Guaranteeing a better UX while reducing the impact on the operator’s

bandwidth removes any incentive to use traffic shaping (see reference at end of

document).

The rights management challenge

A full OTT or “TV Everywhere” service will need to support many different

connected and mobile devices, with live and on-demand video running side by

side over both managed and unmanaged networks. This poses a number of

challenges for content protection and authentication, especially for Pay TV

operators used to having full control over their infrastructure and CPE (Consumer

Premises Equipment). To introduce a “TV Everywhere” service, operators face the

challenge of maintaining the security of retail CE devices secure for premium

content. This has always been a challenge in Pay TV distribution, but is greatly

amplified as the variety of target devices increases. Pay TV operators will need to

deploy robust content protection and ensure that this solution will remain secure

over time, in order to fulfil their contractual obligations to content owners. This

means that the Pay TV operators will need to monitor piracy activity and manage

security upgrades.

In some cases a complete TV Everywhere service will need to support multiple CA

(Conditional Access)/DRM standards as well as multiple devices. This is because

not all devices that an OTT service needs to reach will always be running the

same CA/DRM. For instance, the operator may need to support Microsoft

PlayReady for PCs and tablets OTT, and a CA/DRM from a specific vendor for STBs

in its managed network.

Under this scenario, Microsoft would be in charge of security for the PC, and a

vendor such as Viaccess-Orca would be in charge of the client technology that it

would provide (a DRM client based on PlayReady for tablets and smartphones,

and a DRM client based on Viaccess-Orca’s own technology for STBs). At present

the service provider would have to cope with such multiple DRM configurations,

as

well as the complex license provision with the multiple CA/DRM keys for the user’s

various devices. The new pre-integrated approach being promoted by

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Harmonic, Broadpeak and Viaccess-Orca can relieve operators of these

complexities.

At the same time the industry is moving towards a set of common OTT standards

for streaming, encryption and file structure that will help support different DRMs in

future. The objective is to enable operators to encode and encrypt content just

once for distribution and playback across all the target devices they may want

reach in a complete TV Everywhere deployment.

This convergence around common standards is being driven by two parallel and

complementary standards movements, MPEG with DASH, which is described

above, and the Digital Entertainment Content Ecosystem (DECE), with its

UltraViolet download to own/rent platform. Both DASH and UltraViolet have

adopted the Common File Format (CFF) and Common Encryption (CENC)) for

transmission of video, laying the ground for convergence towards a unified online

video framework.

This separates encryption from the DRM, which is an essential step for large scale

OTT, enabling a service provider to address a multi-DRM constellation of devices

from a single head end, encrypting just once. It recognizes the fact that, while

there is broad agreement now that CENC provides sufficient protection for video

content, there will be different DRMs to suit varying device platforms and service

requirements. It means that specific DRMs can be deployed on particular devices

to satisfy the requirements of content owners.

The idea is equivalent to what the DVB achieved with Simulcrypt, in agreeing a

common encryption system but then allowing individual DRMs or Conditional

Access (CA) systems freedom to decide how to distribute the keys. UV and

MPEG-DASH have taken a similar approach in separating the DRM from the

encryption. This makes sense given that encryption is used to generate keys for

transmission of encrypted control words that in turn scramble the content, and

these keys can then be distributed and managed in different ways to suit varying

service requirements.

The Common Encryption Scheme (CENC) specifies standard encryption and key

mapping methods that can be exploited by many key management systems so

that a given file can be decrypted using different DRMs. The scheme operates by

defining the common format for the encryption-related metadata necessary to

decrypt the protected streams, but crucially leaves the details of rights mappings,

key acquisition and storage, and rules over DRM compliance, to the individual

DRM system, or to the system supporting the encryption scheme.

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The head-end integration challenge

Scalability can still be challenging, especially if many different encoding profiles

are required. The sheer volume of video chunks means that the head-end’s

integration with the CDN is critical to managing this issue. A pre-integrated

solution is particularly critical for short time-to-market here.

But even for a smaller standalone OTT deployment, flexibility is required in the

encoding solution. Harmonic Inc. powers the encoding of the pre-integrated

solution discussed in this paper for live TV and VoD.

For hybrid IPTV/OTT deployments, targeting larger subscriber bases, scalability and

cost are challenging. A hardware based architecture like Harmonic’s ProStream

1000 ACE is designed to meet this live multicast and ABR encoding challenge.

Carrier grade redundancy is as important for OTT as it is for IPTV for any operator

wanting to provide high quality service competing with broadcast.

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Opportunities with OTT delivery

Paul Berriman, CTO of PCCW in Hong Kong stresses that monetization is both “the

key challenge and the biggest potential reward” for operators to reach with OTT.

“Technology like virtualizing the STB into devices is now clearly a Capex and Opex

reward, where STB management used to be a challenge.”

He went on to say that “OTT clearly represents a huge opportunity for local

players like PCCW. We can add a lot of value as a subscriber accesses content

by packaging and promoting it, then profiling users on devices, location,

demographics, usage etc. as well as providing a single subscription.”

The me-too OTT services some TV operators initially threw up to reduce churn are

still running. This early motivation is still there, but is being overtaken by the desire

to extend the service reach through different networks onto multiple devices.

Telecom Italia illustrates another aspect of this double-edge with its Cubovision

OTT offering, used to complement the core IPTV product. After explaining how

they extend their footprint to homes with as little as 1.5 MBPS connections,

including beyond their own network, Telecom Italia recently said of its OTT

product: “Cubovision suite is available beyond IPTV traditional boundaries,

granting HD quality to the majority of customers.”

IP network operators in very large, sparsely populated territories, see OTT video

delivery as a way to leapfrog IPTV. This is what Australian incumbent Telstra has

done, reaching a third of a million homes in less than two years without the huge

cost of upgrading its network to support multicast.

The advantage of pre-integration, bringing rights management together with

streaming and a great UX, is time-to-market, which can be paramount when

being the first mover can still give a decisive advantage.

Opportunities for revenue sharing exist between different combinations of

broadcaster, content owner and operator, and will open up new kinds of

opportunities we can’t yet see.

Thanks to plummeting CDN costs it is already cheaper in 2012 to unicast live TV

via OTT than over satellite for small deployments below a million subscribers.

At current HDTV bandwidths, it will be cheaper for the largest deployments with

tens of millions of subs to go OTT within the decade. Of course, this doesn’t

address the quality issues discussed above.

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Criteria for defining OTT delivery strategy & ecosystem

As with build or lease, the dilemma between custom-build, best-of-breed, single-

vendor or pre-integrated is present for major operators deploying video delivery

infrastructure. The following table illustrates why we believe a pre-integrated

solution is usually best.

Custom

Build Single

Vendor

Best of

breed Pre-Integrated

Tailored to operator needs ✔ ✔ ✔

Fast time to market ✔ ✔

Future proof ✔ ✔

Ability to swap out a component ✔

Standards compliant ✔ ✔

Low integration risk ✔ ✔ ✔

Scalability ✔ ✔

Standardization efforts are ensuring that although the OTT cookbook contains

many different recipes, they can all be produced using the same set of tools and

building blocks. We have described how key standards such as MPEG-DASH and

Ultraviolet are converging and pulling common components such as CENC and

CFF together. The Digital Living Network Alliance (DLNA) is also playing a key role

in uniting underlying standards within a common framework for device and

service interoperability within the home.

The Open IPTV Forum (OIPF), is emerging as an overarching arbiter of OTT

standards. The OIPF is now working towards the ambitious but attainable goal of

facilitating interoperability, not just between devices and components of a single

OTT service, but between multiple services. This is being achieved within the OIPF’s

Open Internet Profile, according to Nilo Mitra, OIPF President. “This provides

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support for streamed and downloaded Video on Demand using HTTP as a

delivery mechanism, as well as mechanisms for interactivity with the content.”

OIPF specifications make interfaces between the service provider and the

consuming device transparent. Mitra told us “if a service provider and a

connected TV were to implement a portal based on the OIPF’s DAE browser

specifications, content protection based on its choice of a content protection

solution, which is Marlin, and the specified media formats for content, they should

interoperate out-of-the box. Indeed, the OIPF has interoperability events where

connected TVs and STBs from member companies are tested against portals and

media streams provided by its service provider members.”

Interoperability will not remove the logistical and support complexities of OTT

services, which is a major reason we believe so strongly in our pre-integrated

approach.

Progress on standardization will not stave off the operational and support

challenges OTT brings on a much bigger scale than either cable TV or IPTV ever

did. The operators’ remit no longer ends with a device that they own and can

access remotely for troubleshooting, and if necessary swap out. OTT introduces a

grey area consisting of devices that the user has introduced and may well be the

cause of a service problem. This point was made by Bouygues Telecom’s

Abihssira, noting, “the challenge of OSS/BSS is tougher than many OTT hopefuls

realize.” Abihssira highlighted the issues faced by Sony with its PlayStation 3 Live

service on this front in 2011, where rival Microsoft with Xbox was able to gain

ground because of superior support. The challenge is simple to state, as Abihssira

pointed out. “Who do I call when it’s broken?”

This led Abihssira to argue that OSS/BSS gives operators an opportunity to

differentiate their service.

That will only be true if the operator uses the right platform. A pre-integrated

approach is well placed to match the OSS/BSS requirements of most

deployments.

Above all pre-integration takes most of the risk and pain out of OTT deployment,

while giving the operator or broadcaster the benefit of best of breed technology

in the key sectors including content discovery, streaming, and security. Just as

with any other major deployment decision credentials forged in the pre-OTT era

of broadcast and video infrastructure will be paramount for many operators.

The pre-integration group should be able to demonstrate leadership in each of

the respective fields, that the components really do fit together, and that the

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combined platform has the flexibility and scalability to match all Unified Service

Delivery Platform requirements now and going forward.

The pre-integrated approach of Viaccess-Orca, Broadpeak and Harmonic

described in the diagram below meets these requirements, and is future proof.

Each vendor is committed to interoperability, thus insuring that best-in-class

components can always be chosen and swapped in or out. All vendors here

share a common vision of how OTT will evolve around the unifying platform of

MPEG-DASH, bringing together the key underlying technologies for OTT:

streaming, processing distributed with agility from core to edge, content security,

and presentation.

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Looking forward…

In the User Experience debate, broadcasters still have the upper hand for service

availability and reach when it comes to HD video. The jury is still out as to how far

users will accept potentially lower quality in exchange for lower prices.

Broadcasters are already investing more in OTT VoD than traditional VoD, as we

saw with several examples like Canal+. This trend is bound to grow as in the end it

enables VoD to be offered from many more sources. But for broadband

operators it also enables walled garden VoD to be accessed from any

connected device. OTT technology, namely ABR, leverages available resources

to deliver superior video quality, including over home networks. So once OTT is

prevalent, we believe its long-term convergence with IPTV is inevitable. To unify

network encoding, security, delivery, and most importantly the user’s experience,

one single delivery architecture is needed.

But as we saw, this will take time: it will be difficult to make the business case and

recoup recent investments, in particular in VDSL deployments.

OIPF is currently in the best position to organise and standardise this solution. The

technology has been around for a few years already but we need components

such as DASH or DLNA to keep costs low enough for new business models to

enable this future.

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Annexes

Some references

Reference URL

1 White paper on ABR, authored by Benjamin

Schwarz http://goo.gl/DZH6Q

2 Short Harmonic Article on MPEG-DASH http://goo.gl/HwEi1

3 OIPF White Paper on connecting TV to the future http://goo.gl/QOQaa

4 Blog on the death of IPTV http://goo.gl/P67ZQ

5 LinkedIn comment thread on the above blog http://goo.gl/KgiPq

6 ISP traffic shaping http://goo.gl/UdlPf

7 Viaccess-Orca White Paper on OTT http://goo.gl/sT6tn

8 Viaccess-Orca’s 3 multi-screen maxims http://goo.gl/AVSAF

9 Viaccess-Orca blog: TV in the cloud – is there

really a doubt? http://goo.gl/U5cNA

For more information

For information on the pre-integrated solution mentioned in this white paper

please contact:

Viaccess-Orca Efrat Fenigson, Director of

Marketing

efrat.fenigson@viaccess-

orca.com

Broadpeak Nivedita Nouvel, VP Marketing [email protected]

Harmonic Thierry Fautier, Sr Director

Convergence Solutions [email protected]

White Paper

authors

Benjamin Schwarz

Philip Hunter

[email protected]

[email protected]

http://goo.gl/DZH6Q

http://goo.gl/HwEi1

http://goo.gl/QOQaa

http://goo.gl/P67ZQ

http://goo.gl/KgiPq

http://goo.gl/UdlPf

http://goo.gl/sT6tn

http://goo.gl/AVSAF

http://goo.gl/U5cNA

mailto:[email protected]






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Glossary of acronyms

ABR Adaptive Bite Rate (Streaming)

CA Conditional Access

CAS CA System

CDN Content Delivery Network

CENC Common Encryption

CFF Common File Format

CMS Content Management System

DECE Digital entertainment Common Ecosytem

DLNA Digital Living Network Alliance

DRM Digital Rights Management

EPG Electronic Program Guide

FCC Fast Channel Change

FTTH Fibre To The Home

HbbTV Hybrid Broadband Broadcast TV

HD High Definition (Video)

HLS HTTP Live Streaming (Apple format)

HTML Hypertext Mark-up Language (initially used to write Web pages in)

HTTP Hypertext Transport Protocol (used to transport HTML

IPTV Internet Protocol based TeleVision

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KPI Key performance indicator

KQI Key quality indicator

MPEG Moving Picture Experts Group

MPEG-DASH MPEG – Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP

MOCA Multimedia Over Coax

MSO Multiple System Operators (US Cable operators)

OIPF Open IPTV Forum

OTT Over The Top

SD Standard Definition (video)

SDP Service Delivery Platform

SLA Service level agreement

SvoD Subscription based VoD

TDM Time division multiplexing

TvoD Transaction based VoD

UI User Interface

USDP Unified Service Delivery Platform

VoD Video On Demand

ott white paper

Technology

ott delivery

ott technologies

ott services

ott access

ott technology

ott sword

ott banner

ott package